a blog about my family, life in a foreign country, and great homemade food!

Kian turned 7 months last week, and what a month it was! From the time he turned 6 months to the tine he turned 7 months he learned to:

Fully crawl on hands and knees

Pull up to standing on us, the couch, in the crib

Walk along the couch

Get to a sitting position

Climb stairs! (He climbed three stairs and then tried to turn around)

Sit securely by himself

And now there is no stoping him! He is practicing standing without holding anything now. He thinks he is suc a big boy!! He got two more teeth this month as well, so now he has 4 chompers.

Eating – This is not Kian’s favorite yet. He is eating more solids than he was a month ago, but it’s still usually just a few bites per meal. He loves mango and enjoys other fruits as well such as watermelon, plums, sometimes bananas. If fruit touches his cheeks, though (especially apple) he gets a rash. I fed him smoothie from a spoon an it got all over his face so he got eczema which is slowly going away. He’ll eat a few bites of soft cooked veggies and bean burgers. He won’t eat his oatmeal at all which is a bummer. I tried making it into some cookies with banana, but that didn’t go over well either. I’ll have to try something else. He likes homemade banana/oat bread, so maybe I’ll add some of his baby cereal to that, although like anything he only eats a few bites anyway!

Sleep – The past couple months have been pretty horrid in the sleep department. He was waking more and more often, and often waking soon after I put him in the crib. But he was also teething so I couldn’t really do anything about it. So I ended up sleeping in the armchair holding him on the nursing pillow (it’s a nice secure position) for most of every night. I would try to stay awake to put him in the crib after nursing, but I was so sleep deprived that I couldn’t help but fall asleep! Not even Netflix or Facebook could save me. So after his teeth came in, I decided something had to be done! So after nursing him for the night I put him in his crib. He cried of course. I stayed in the room, laid him down periodically, sat by the crib patting him and singing his lullaby quite a bit, etc. he yelled and cried for hours before finally sleeping. I did let him nurse once every hour to soothe him, soothe his throat, etc. I wanted him to know he had to go to sleep in his crib, but I wasn’t abandoning him. It was hard hearing the crying, but he had to learn. And he did! It took 4-5 nights before he would stay asleep after his first night feeding and not cry in the crib, but it only took that first night before he would nurse and go back to sleep in his crib for middle of the night feedings. So now I nurse him at bedtime, let him doze off in my arms, and put him in the crib. If he wakes up I’ll pat him a bit. During the night he’ll wake up 2-4 times to nurse. He falls asleep while nursing and then he stays asleep when I put him in his crib. Much better! And since he is not waking up 6-8 times, I am able to stay awake during his feeding and not fall asleep in the armchair! After the first 2-3 better nights I was still feeling very woozy and lethargic all day, kind of like I was extremely jet lagged. My body had to get used to getting more than 1-2 hours of sleep at a time! Now I get at least one 3-4 hour chunk, whew!! And another one or two 1-3 hour chunks. It’s doable for now!

Kian loves his sisters! Svara is a big helper in watching him if needed while I prepare a meal. Talisa is great at entertaining him as well. I do have to make sure someone else is around when Talisa is playing with him (unless he’s in the exersaucer) as age can be a bit rough trying to pull him around. He is so mobile, yet still needs to practice balance, so we have to follow him around closely!

Other things he loves to do – blow raspberries, stick out his tongue, play peekaboo and clapping games, listen to Enya, take baths

He does not like – getting his diaper changed (wrestling match every time!), getting dressed, when I leave the room

That’s it for his 7 month update. He learned so much this past month, I hope he takes a break and chills more this month!!

3 years, it has actually been nearly 3 years since I’ve updated the blog! Crazy I know. I like to keep the blog to look back on and it’ll be fun for the kids to look back on as well,. It’s a bit daunting starting back when I’ve been away so long, but here goes!

We now have 3 kids! Our little boy, Kian Akela Naresh, was born on December 19th, and has just turned 6 months old. I’ll share some photos of him over the months and give a little update on how he is doing now.

I had a fairly quick, quite painful, natural delivery. No complications, but it did take me almost three weeks to recover enough to feel remotely normal, ugh! Kian was my biggest baby at 3.8kg.

His sisters have loved him from day one!

From birth he looked a lot like Talisa did. He had the longest hair of any of the kids, just a tad longer than Talisa’s was. Like Talisa, his hair hasn’t grown since birth, it has just thinned out a bit so now it looks brown compared to how dark it looked at birth.

Here is one of the only photos of him with a pacifier, as he never took to them the way the girls did. The good thing is that I don’t have to worry about bringing one everywhere we go and keeping it clean and popping it back in his mouth throughout the night. The downside is that it takes more effort to get him to sleep since he doesn’t have that aide.

My sister made this sick monkey onesie for Talisa, and the monkey is Talisa’s as well.

Full house!

Kian has always enjoyed a good chest nap!

Here is a nice photo of all the kids at Naw-Ruiz, our Baha’i new year.

It was hard catching Kian’s sweet pouty mouth, this was the best we could manage. Just makes me want to squeeze him and kiss those cheeks!

He loves going for “airplane rides”, it’s a sure way to make him smile eve if he’s cranky.

Kian was a swaddled sleeper, just like Talisa. It helped him nurse peacefully and stay asleep. I had to stop swaddling him at 4 1/2 months because he was rolling over even when swaddled, yikes! It hasn’t been as easy for him to stay asleep since then. He used to have a 4-5 hour stretch of sleep in the beginning of the night, but not since stopping the swaddle, ugh.

There were and still are many days when he takes a nap on me in order to get in a good nap and allow me to have a nap as well.

Svara begged for months to carry Kian. Finally when he was steady enough we let her carry him sometimes. Now at 6 months she says he is getting way too heavy, haha!

Kian loves giving big slobbery kisses to me and the girls. But he knows he’ll get prickly whiskers from Naren, so he doesn’t give him many kisses, haha.

Kian started rolling around 4 months, and at almost 5 months started trying to crawl. For almost a month all he could manage was to move backwards, which made him MAD! He would grumble and complain the whole time he was scooting backwards. Finally about two weeks before turning 6 months he started figuring out how to move forwards. He has the legs okay, he hops onto his knees and rocks back and forth. But he doesn’t have the arms worked out, so he basically throws himself forward, plopping his arms behind before getting onto his knees and hands to repeat. It’s funny, like a seal flopping around.

Kian is a pretty smiley boy, except when he’s cranky, which is also fairly often! It’s like he’s mad that he’s a baby. He wants to walk, talk, eat, and use all the big kid and groom up stuff, NOW!

Often he wants to be held, but Naren and I are both busy. Baby carrier to the rescue!

The exersaucer, which we bought for Svara when she was a baby, is the first place he plays after waking from a nap. He’s usually happy to play there for about 20 minutes while I get some things done. If he’s too cranky I just give him an icecube in his baby mesh feeder and he’s good for 10 minutes or so.

Kian enjoys sitting in the high chair during mealtimes, but he wishes he could get st everything on the table! He’s not a big fan of his food yet. He liked oats, but it seemed to make him throw up and give him a rash around his mouth, so I’ll wait a bit before trying that again. He’ll eat a few bites of puréed banana. He doesn’t much care for pumpkin. He’ll play with a few grains of rice. Time to try some new foods! Fresh apple gave him hives.

But who needs food when you have yummy toes!

Teeth! Kian got his two bottom teeth at 5 1/2 months, which is several months earlier than the girl’s got teeth. Told you he wants to grow up too fast!!

Kian is a sweetie and we all adore him. He has, of course, added a level of chaos to the house, as all babies do. We managed through the first 5 months before starting to settle into a nap and bedtime routine. Now he usually takes 3 naps a day and starts going to sleep by 8:30pm. Sometimes he’ll nap for 30 minutes, sometimes 2 hours. Sometimes I have to hold him, sometimes he’ll stay asleep when I put him down. Some nights are better than others, the past few nights have been really rough. Maybe the 6 month growth spurt or maybe teething again, who knows! Some nights he wakes up 2-3 times, other nights every hour. Often I give up at some point and fall asleep in the arm chair with him on the nursing pillow (it’s nice and secure). I know these months are fleeting, so I try not to fuss too much. I do feel bad for the girls sometimes, though, as so much of my time has been spent putting Kian to sleep!! They are both a big help, though.

I think I’ll stop here for now. I just managed to put Kian down (yay for WordPress on the iPad or I would never get work done!). Hopefully I’ll manage to get back into semi regular blogging!

Lately Svara has been enjoying baking more. But it can’t just be any baking – it has to be baking as much as possible BY HERSELF.

At seven years old I certainly can’t let her have free range of the kitchen, so I help her get out the ingredients and materials needed. She reads the recipe to find out everything she needs, and then she does all of the mixing, measuring, etc. I help with the oven. Maybe in another year or two I’ll take another step back and let her get out the ingredients, clean up, and even place things into the oven herself.

For now it is enough ‘herself’ for her to proudly exclaim that she has made these goodies ALL BY HERSELF. She couldn’t be more proud. Neither could I.

Svara’s favorite cookbook is Live Learn Love Eat (you can find it for sale here by the author). This book is written by a vegan mother of three. The recipes are very child friendly and family friendly. It is both the fact that the book has children in it AND the fact that she can easily read and understand it herself that appeals to Svara. I love this cookbook as well!

The recipes Svara made on this particular day were the chocolate cupcakes with raspberry frosting. Mmmm! The recipe for both are here on her blog. The only thing we did differently was that I put the raspberry puree into a sieve to get the seeds out. I wanted a smooth frosting.

Svara had a blast making these cupcakes, and of course eating them as well!

I’m sure it’ll be a matter of days before she’s in the kitchen again paging through the cookbook for another recipe to make 🙂

I haven’t done a full post about Talisa for quite awhile, so I thought I’d update a bit on some things I want to remember about these fleeting toddler times! For the record, she is 23 months old. Can’t believe she’ll be 2 in less than a month!! Haven’t even started planning her birthday yet, it’ll probably be very low key.

Talisa LOOOVES to color. Markers are her favorite, but as you can imagine she’s not so good about putting caps back on, and over a period of about 3 months all of our markers have slowly been thrown away. The marker drawer is now empty. oops! I used coloring time to try to teach her some manners (she’s pretty good at manners in general considering her age!). Like most little ones, she likes to grab what she wants, when she wants it. So if I was using a marker she wanted (which was every time of course) I asked her to say “Can I have that please?” and I’d either say sure and give it to her, or ask her to let me finish and then I’d give it to her. She did pretty well, though often she’d grab the marker and quickly say “Can I have that please? Sure! Thanks!” while pulling it out of my hand. What do I say to that?? haha

The crocodile tears have started as well! Of course she often really truly cries, but sometimes she cries just to try to get her way and she has this habit of covering her eyes with her hands. I try not to laugh, really I do.

It’s my little kitchen de-organizer! Her most favorite thing to do in the kitchen is beg me to carry her while I am cooking. But if I can distract her from that, she’ll go to the cupboard! Sometimes she takes things out and piles them on a table, other time she takes a few things out to play cooking. Other times she completely empties the tupperware shelf!

I think she has some sort of innate sense of organization (I must take advantage of that!!). When she takes containers out of the cupboard she takes off the tops and puts each top underneath its corresponding container. nicely done!

Talisa has her share of falls like any toddler, but in this photo she is doing one of her favorite games – falling on purpose! She falls down and then Svara has to rush up to her saying “oh no! oh no!” Talisa thinks it’s hilarious. Of course.

This is the last photo I have of Talisa in her high chair. She hasn’t sat in it for oh, 3-4 months I think. In fact we don’t even have it anymore, we lent it to a friend who has 2 little ones who both like to sit in high chairs but they only had one chair. Now Talisa sits at the table like a big person. Except she’s not a big person which means she’s either too low in the chair or she has to kneel. But to her that’s better than a high chair! I thought about getting a booster seat, but I don’t know if she would refuse to sit in it because it’s not the same as our chairs, in which case it’d be a waste of money…

Oh, these stairs. Talisa goes up and down these stairs too many times a day to count. seriously. For many months my heart jumped every single time she’d go up or down and I’d run to make sure she’d be okay. Now I’m pretty confident and she’s super confident, so I don’t have a mini panic attack 50 times a day anymore – whew!

Sunglasses. too cute! Oh, and she puts them on by herself of course.

Time to (un)help with the chores! The best time for Talisa to sweep is AFTER I have finished sweeping. But she prefers to sweep while I sweep, which means thrashing her broom in the dirt pile.

Teaching a toddler their colors can be quite frustrating. Talisa picked up on color names quickly, but matching them to the right color is a whole other ballgame. I remember the same thing with Svara – wondering if perhaps they can’t see the colors the same as us or what. So I put it to the test! I found these foam “popsicle sticks” at the store and snatched them up. I gave them to Talisa along with containers of similar colors. And she matched them! All by herself! I was so proud – and happy to know that she CAN see her colors. Naming them? Now that’ll take awhile. But she’s very interested. She points to things and says some random color, I tell her the color, she repeats it, over and over. Fun times.

Talisa can definitely be a little goofball. She makes faces, does funny walks, silly stances, anything to get a giggle out of us. And if we do laugh? She’ll do it over and over for our everlasting entertainment.

So let’s see, what else….

Talisa talks up a storm and speaks in full sentences. Yesterday we were outside and it was time to go in to get ready for bed. I told her and she walked away saying “NO, I play outside.” Okay, then! (sorry kiddo, you can talk, but I can still carry you!) One of the things she says funny is “NO WITE!” (for no way). She can count to about 18, but she skips the number 5 every single time, and I think she skips a couple of the teens as well.

Books, books, book! This girl still thankfully loves her books. Pretty much the only times during the day that I can count on having some peace while she’s awake is when she gets caught up in her books (she sits and reads by herself for 5 to even 30 minutes at a time) or when she’s watching home videos of herself on the iPad (desperate times call for desperate measures, meals HAVE to be cooked!). Often in the morning she wakes up, nurses, and slides off the bed to toddle off to her book pile. She reads her books by herself while we catch a few extra minutes of Zzzzzzzs. Until I get hit on the head with a book of course.

Eating – some days Talisa has a good appetite, others she doesn’t. She’s still keen on frozen blueberries and would eat them for every meal of every day if we had enough and if I let her. Oh, she’s not allergic to chocolate anymore, YAY! She used to get hives from chocolate, but over the past month I’ve tested it a few times and no reaction, so now she gets to have some chocolate when we do (I make a lot of healthy treats that include some cocoa powder). She’s not so keen on veggies, but we keep trying and there are some she’ll eat (she likes raw tomatoes!). She likes carrots and will eat leafy greens if they are chopped small and in soup. She and Svara often share a small pot of miso noodle soup for lunch (healthy noodles, organic silken tofu, and either grated carrots or chopped leafy greens in a miso broth). Easy to make and they both gobble it up – win win!

Talisa has become quite possessive of me where Svara is concerned. If Talisa is not in the best mood and she sees me hugging Svara, all hell breaks loose. She screams, pushes Svara (but she DOES say excuse me hehe) and asks to nurse. I try to keep most of my cuddles for Svara when Talisa isn’t looking for the time being.

SLEEP – if you have read previous updates about Talisa, sleep has ALWAYS been an issue for one reason or another. It wasn’t getting any better after 18 months and I was at my wits end and couldn’t even think straight due to sleep exhaustion. My mom sent me a baby sleeping book for my birthday, so I had a read through it. I never was one for crying out. I did sleep training with Svara at various times with various success, but I was glad to have never had to do that with Talisa. BUT sleep was getting worse and the book made some good points – she wasn’t getting good sleep either, and she wasn’t crying in distress. and she certainly didn’t physically NEED to nurse 5-10 times a night. Yeah. So with everything I read, I decided it was time to cut her off nursing at night. So I thought maybe I’d be kind and just hold her but not let her nurse. That didn’t work since I had to sit there and hold her for 2 hours a time waiting for her to fall asleep enough for me to put her in her crib. Not cool. I had other things to do at night – like work and SLEEP. So…. one night when Naren and Svara were at a function I let her cry. I checked on her every 10-15 minutes to let her know I was around and to make sure she had her pacifier and security cloth (her fasa and toony). It took 45 minutes for her to fall asleep. Things got a LOT better after that. For about 3 months it was lovely and I could hardly believe it. I did end up nursing her early in the mornings (5 or 6) as she’d then fall back asleep. If I didn’ tnurse her at that time she’d be up for the day. Not fun. Then she got sick, and we were all sick. And that dragged on for a month and a half and things were BAD again. I can’t deny a snotty coughy baby who wants to nurse in the middle of the night. So we were back to little sleep. A few weeks ago she was finally totally over her cold so I had to go back and do the whole letting her cry again. Took 40 minutes that time and it’s been better since. she still wakes up and I actually bring her into our bed when she gets up sometime around 5 (sometimes a little earlier) because it’s just easier that way. But if she wakes up earlier I just lay her down, tell her goodnight, and she goes back to sleep. So glad to get a bit of sleep back again!

Nursing – still going strong! When Talisa was a baby she nursed when she was hungry and that was about it. After about 15 montsh or so she started becoming more emotionally attached to nursing, wanting to nurse when she was sad, mad, etc. She still does that. I am currently trying to defer that when possible, trying to divert her attention elsewhere, give her cuddles but not nursing, etc. But sometimes she’s just in hysterics and it’s the only thing that’ll calm her down. Other than those times she nurses in the morning, before and after nap, and at bedtime (and then once around 5am or so). At some point in the next 2-3 months I’ll probably start phasing out the after nap nursing and go slowly from there. I like still knowing she’s getting the extra complete nutrients from breastfeeding, and if it helps her sleep I’m all for it!

I think that’s enough for one post, I’ve got some other things to do online before I myself get to bed. I should be back soon with a post all about…. homeschooling!

Sometimes it is just TOO hot and you just HAVE to dance in the “rain”. At least that is what Talisa would say! She loves it when Naren sets up the hose like a sprinkler. He usually starts by watering the plants and then she convinces him to spray her and then he sets up the “sprinkler”. Svara usually joins in, but she didn’t feel like changing on this particular day.

Several months ago someone in a group on facebook mentioned this petting zoo here in KL. It is called Farm in the City and spans over many acres of land. They have many animals you can pet, and some that you just enjoy looking at. We decided to take the kids here instead of the zoo as it is more hands on. There are a lot of photos here, but this is only about 1/4 of all of the photos we took! The girls both had a blast and Svara is still asking when we are going to go again!

Ready to go into Farm in the City!

Pony ride! This was a really short ride, but Svara of course enjoyed it anyway.

I’m glad that Talisa is still fine with being carried in the carrier. We were there for about 2 hours and a stroller is not a good option there at all. This was easy and I could just let her down in the places that were suitable for her.

The dinosaur turtle turned out to be a snapping turtle

look up!

I guess this is his usual resting place!

They had a large area for some of the animals to roam around in. It was nice and shady even though it was a hot day!

feeding the birds!

Another large bird enclosure.

This bird is so cool!

feeding the deer

Loving the deer

eek, scary scarecrow!

time for some net fishing

Not even Naren managed to catch a fish

And the girls’ favorite part – petting bunnies!

just a *little* excited

Giving a little too much love to the guinea pig

feeding the fish

hungry fish!

big eyes!

Svara petting a large iguana

This was actually Svara’s favorite part, holding a chick, as she has never done that before.

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About Honey

I am a stay-at-home mama currently living in Malaysia with my husband, Naren, our 7 year old daughter Svara, and our 2 year old daughter Talisa. Some things that will show up in this blog are family, vegetarian and vegan cooking and baking, crafts, nature, family, education, and thoughts on life. I am a Baha'i.